Donna Cryer didn't plan to spend her life reforming healthcare. Healthcare made that decision for her. When she became a patient, she did what patients are supposed to do: she trusted the system.

She followed the process. She showed up, waited, and hoped the right people were paying attention. They weren't. What she found wasn't a broken system so much as an incomplete one, built by brilliant people who had never been on the other side of the table. Policies written without patients.

Drugs developed without their input. Decisions made, consistently, about people who were never in the room. She decided to get in the room. Armed with a Harvard education, a Georgetown law degree, and a frustration she couldn't shake, Donna built what the system was missing.

First CryerHealth, her strategic advisory practice, where she became the person the C-suites of Pfizer, Novartis, Genentech, Sanofi, and Takeda called when patient strategy had to be right. Then the Global Liver Institute, a nonprofit she built from the ground up, raising more than $30 million and overseeing $42 million in patient-centered research grants.

Along the way, she invented a role that didn't exist: the Chief Patient Officer. Because if patients were going to matter inside organizations, someone needed to be accountable for making sure they did.

Today, Donna advises executives, shapes policy, and takes stages from Capitol Hill to SXSW, bringing the same thing to every room: the clarity that comes from living the issue, not just studying it.

She showed up as a patient. She never left.